Does the White House Have Wi-Fi? — Is the White House more of a museum than a working office? Does it even have WiFi? — MSNBC has reported that on their first day on the job, Obama's White House staffers suffered from downgrades on every front. During the campaign and the transition …

OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript — A pretty amazing piece of JavaScript dropped yesterday and it's going to take a little bit to digest it all. It's a GreaseMonkey script, written by ‘Shaun Friedle’, that automatically solves captchas provided by the site Megaupload.

The New Twhirl (preview release) for Team Seesmic-Twhirl — We are as excited as you are about Twhirl and are happy to announce a new version today which we will be circulating as a preview to get your help and feedback. We are gathering a “circle of friends” for Twhirl and Seesmic …

Twitter can has OAuth? — Twitter API lead Alex Payne announced today that Twitter is now accepting applications to its OAuth private beta, making good on the promises he made on the Twitter API mailing list and had repeated on the January 8 Citizen Garden podcast (transcript by stilist).

General availability for the Windows 7 Beta to end — First off: thank you for your interest in beta testing Windows 7! As we near January 24th, we wanted to update everyone again on the next steps for the Windows 7 Beta. The amount of feedback we have received has been amazing and continues to pour in.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs still thinking big — Over the course of the past 40 years, Silicon Valley has experienced regular cycles of economic ups and downs that come with being one of the world's leading centers of innovation. And during those down cycles, it's become routine for folks …

IBM Confirms Layoffs — Despite releasing stronger than expected earnings on Tuesday and at the time expressing optimism for 2009, a round of job cuts is underway at IBM Corp. — The week has already seen heavy layoffs in the IT sector, including 5,000 at Microsoft and another 5,000 to 6,000 at Intel.

ASCAP Targets “Copy Left / Free Culture” Enemy... Performance rights organization (PRO) ASCAP is now pondering ways to defuse the influence of non-traditional copyright thinkers, according to correspondence shared Thursday with Digital Music News. According to an invitation mailed …

Surprise! VC Funding Fell Off a Cliff in Q4 — As expected, the venture industry is seeing the fallout from the economic crisis, with fourth-quarter investments dropping to a total of $5.4 billion invested in 818 companies, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers …

Others could follow Google's move to reset options — SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google Inc. is showing its love for its employees by giving them a second chance to profit from their wilting stock options. But the move irked shareholders still stuck with agonizing losses on their investments.